


Bless You for a Curse

by ErnestScrivener



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Aziraphale is usually the dom but also the one who likes being tied up, Dubious Consent, Excessive Drinking, Explicit Sexual Content, Female-Presenting Aziraphale (Good Omens), Female-Presenting Crowley (Good Omens), Friends to Lovers, Historical, Ineffable Kinktober 2020, Light Dom/sub, Male-Presenting Aziraphale (Good Omens), Male-Presenting Crowley (Good Omens), Multi, Semi-Public Sex, angels and demons contain multitudes too, but like friends who fuck each other using increasingly bad excuses to lovers, dubious continuity errors, the author tries to keep the ambiance to smut ratio somewhat reasonable
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:41:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26786122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErnestScrivener/pseuds/ErnestScrivener
Summary: Crowley is a demon with a soft spot for softness. Aziraphale is an angel with a decidedly not-soft spot for something a bit more dangerous. Together they embark on a little ethereal experimentation.Or, 1,000 years of sexual escapades and a few paragraphs of actual communication.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 45
Kudos: 83





	1. Snakebite

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! A few things about this fic:  
> 1\. This started as fills for the Ineffable Kinktober 2020 challenge and metastasized into a historical fic after I swore I'd never write another historical fic.  
> 2\. Some of it has been pre-written and I expect it will update about every 3 days  
> 3\. Consent gets quite dubious in a few chapters, and none of this is meant to be a portrayal of healthy communication in a kinky relationship (or any relationship).

It was almost nightfall. Aziraphale came to a squelching halt and pulled out his directions from a pocket in his cloak.

_Into the fell fen thou must go, that th’innocent pilgrimage may arrive unassail’d. Also, thine employee fitness rewards signup hath not been recorded._

Fell fen—very much in it, Aziraphale thought miserably, feeling the cold seep from his submerged boots all the way up his shivering legs. Pilgrimage—well, he’d warded off the wild beasts in their way so far. Employee fitness rewards—really he was getting a little tired of management badgering him about that when he was trudging around every swamp in England on foot and they were loitering in cumulus lounges.

A sudden and almost imperceptible flash of yellow made him look up. Vapor rose from the bog and twisted skyward. It looked eerily like a nest of snakes.

 _Speaking of which_ _—_

“Oh hello angel.” Crowley’s voice was honeyed, dangerous. _Oh he’s going to be a bother, then_ , Aziraphale thought, sighing a little. “Don’t tell me you’re playing scout leader for those bloody pilgrims back there.”

“Crowley, you can’t impede them,” Aziraphale snapped. “Really, this is important, I’ve been, well, not exactly terribly successful lately. Besides, I let you have that bishop last summer.”

“Oh come off it, he was a lost cause long before I got there. Look, is this really that important? Are you positive those pilgrims are actually going to find an authentic holy toenail clipping?”

“Well, it’s not as if I’ve got an _inventory_ of every relic there is!” Aziraphale said, then, muttering inaudibly, “At least not while Gabriel won’t give me spreadsheet access.”

Crowley sloshed slowly forward. There was a pin on his cloak like a coiled serpent, and the tiny dots of amber for its eyes gleamed in the rising moonlight.

“We could make a deal,” he offered. “I won’t send your pilgrims wandering off into a forsaken briar patch _if_ we can make it look like there was a proper fight. I can’t tell the bosses I let an angel go unscathed.”

Aziraphale felt an odd sensation rising in his body. _Probably the miasmas in the night air,_ he told himself.

“Oh, well that’ll be alright. I can just, erm, give myself a snakebite, I suppose.” He raised his fingers as if to summon a miracle and looked at Crowley with something remarkably like disappointment.

“I mean, they’ll know it’s not really demonic,” Crowley said in a rush. “If you—it might work best if I just. Ah. You know, the old-fashioned way.”

Crowley’s eyes were alight like twin will o’ the wisps: glowing, enticing invitations to stray further into the dark. Aziraphale gave an obligatory look of horror before sighing and unbuttoning his coat.

“I suppose you’d go for the neck if you were really trying?” he asked, tilting his head slightly away.

Crowley took another step closer. _Surely the trembling was from the cold._ He didn’t blink.

“Oh, get on with it, you’re making me nervous,” Aziraphale said. “For goodness’ sake, let’s get this over with.” He was intensely frightened of how little he was frightened when Crowley was very near.

Bending slowly and turning his head so it fit between Aziraphale’s shoulder and jaw, Crowley took two steps forward and one tentative bite.

Aziraphale sucked in a breath ( _definitely some miasmas about, he was feeling terribly light-headed)_ and put a hand on the back of Crowley’s head. The dark red strands of his hair were damp from the fog. 

Crowley bit again, harder. There was a sharp feeling like opening a door into too-brilliant sunlight, a pain that glittered. And around the pain were Crowley’s lips on his flesh, within it the wet flicker of Crowley’s tongue. Aziraphale felt as if he’d wandered too close to the edge of some strange ocean: he was all too content to let the waves lap at him. _Surely that wasn’t how tongues were supposed to move?_

Crowley mumbled something that might have been “are you OK?” through a mouthful of angel skin.

He wasn’t, Aziraphale realized as he nodded and pressed Crowley closer. He was sweating even in the damp chill, he felt as dizzy as he did when ascending to Heaven on an empty stomach, and he noticed the beginning of unacceptable sensations below his tunic. He was aware that Crowley’s hands were on his arm and his chest, pale and questioning.

 _Perhaps questing,_ he thought, as one of Crowley’s hands slipped in around his collar while that wonderful, horrible hot mouth continued to nip at his neck.

“Sorry about this,” Crowley murmured, and Aziraphale’s vision blurred from pain as Crowley bit down, broke skin….

“Are you doing that?” Aziraphale whispered. The swamp around them was suddenly alive with glow worms. Every inch of the sodden space was lit with golden lights like the amber on Crowley’s cloak pin, like the inhuman yellow of his eyes. 

_Not at all the right season for glow worms,_ Aziraphale thought, because all of his other thoughts—about the absurd bargain, about the warmth of Crowley’s mouth, about his own hastening arousal, about the implications of magicking insectoid mood lighting while being at least theoretically mauled by an enemy—those were unthinkable.

Crowley drew back from Aziraphale’s neck to look at the blinking array. There was a trail of blood sliding down from his lower lip. _That’s mine_ , Aziraphale realized, and felt the urge to rebuke Crowley wrestle against the urge to drag Crowley out of the fen, find the nearest halfway flat surface and—

_Oh dear._

“That’s not mine,” Crowley said. “Must be your miracle.” He looked at Aziraphale as if waiting for an answer. Waiting for something more miraculous than Aziraphale could conjure.

 _"Or,_ ” Aziraphale said, taking a step backwards and drawing his cloak around him to hide any untoward evidence. “It’s simply a very strange coincidence. A fluke.”

When he spoke, Crowley sounded like the echo of his own voice. “Right, a fluke.” He cleared his throat and licked the blood from his lip. “Well, you’ve got a decent scar, I didn’t go for any venom, so it should heal in a few, and er, I think I can depart with dignity now I’ve roughed up an angel.”

Aziraphale nodded, feeling unable to speak. A hollowness was filling up his chest, worse than the pain of the bites or the embarrassment at his own irrational reactions.

Crowley turned and walked away into the night. Aziraphale watched him go as the glow worms blinked out one by one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is rated T. For the prompt "Licking/Biting."
> 
> CW for biting, blood.


	2. Midsummer

If he squinted hard at the largest log in the largest bonfire, Aziraphale could see an echo of his old flaming sword.

Or maybe that was the effect of his third bottle of mulberry wine.

The world danced erratically around him like the sparks wheeling in the humid night, and he waved and greeted the blurry faces that passed by with glassy elation. Everyone in the tiny hamlet seemed infected with the same good cheer (or at least inebriated with a fraction of the same wine). The night was clear and starry. A cloud had rumbled in hours earlier, and Aziraphale had dismissed it with a pout and made a note to himself to let it rain on a drearier day.

“What’re you doing grinning at the fire like that? You look positively demonic.”

Aziraphale spun and almost knocked over Crowley. Standing up straight again felt like trying to bring an unruly boat into harbor.

“Oh don’t tell me you’re going to wreak havoc in this nice little place, you horrid beast,” Aziraphale said. It didn’t sound as scornful as he’d intended. In fact, it sounded rather—

“Flattering, angel, but it’s not business. I’m here purely for pleasure.” 

“How am I supposed to believe you?” Aziraphale asked, oddly perturbed by knowing exactly how Crowley formed the word ‘pleasure’ with his mouth.

“Ah come on, I just came to nick some quince tarts.”

Crowley flopped on a mound of grass near the bonfire, making his braided hair swing. Aziraphale intended to begin a lecture on the wrongs of coveting thy neighboring hamlet’s quince tarts, but he found himself sitting down beside Crowley instead, and offering the dregs of his wine.

“Want to try? It’s mulberry,” he said, a little lacking in elocution. Why were words so devilishly thick and difficult to say? “It’s very nice.”

“Ooh, I’ve got mulberry too.” Crowley pulled a dusty bottle from a suspiciously flat pocket. “But it’s gin.” He winked.

“That’ll be a bit strong for me,” Aziraphale said haughtily, watching the grass and the dancing fires swivel of their own accord.

Crowley shrugged and took a long swig, and Aziraphale watched his throat move as he swallowed. He felt strangely entranced—wine made him notice the oddest things.

Mostly Crowley things. Like the tiny fork in Crowley’s tongue as he licked his lips, the way his eyes briefly closed, the delicacy of his fingers as he stoppered the bottle. 

_It’s not wrong to notice things_ _,_ Aziraphale reassured himself, breathing deeply in and out. _It’s only wrong to do wrong._ Gabriel had ‘it’s wrong to do wrong’ in a picture frame somewhere. 

“Too bad there aren’t any glow worms about, they’d complement this whole scene nicely,” Crowley slurred.

Through the lovely haze of drunkenness and firelight Aziraphale could feel panic building at the edges of his awareness, but it couldn’t quite reach him. 

“Oh yes—a shame about that,” he said. 

It was twenty years ago now. A youthful folly committed by a five thousand year old fool. Certainly not the type of thing he’d be inclined to repeat now. Not _here._ Not when he was sitting in the firelit dark with Crowley, intoxicated and happy and noticing how lovely Crowley looked in the warm, flickering glow…

“Think there’ll be fireworks tonight?” Crowley asked. He sank from a sitting position onto one elbow, leaving his legs carelessly strewn across the grass. 

“No, definitely not,” Aziraphale said to the legs. 

“Ah, well, least we’ve got a decent fire.” Crowley made an unfortunate wriggling movement that Aziraphale could feel ricochet across his mind, multiplying and replaying.

“Could I have a drink of yours, actually?” he asked.

“Sure it’s not too strong for you?” Crowley teased, but there was a note of real kindness in it. _His voice sounds like dusk_ , Aziraphale thought wildly. _I don’t think that should be allowed._

Crowley obliged and Aziraphale removed the stopper with ungainly fingers. The gin was bright and strong, sour-sweet with just a hint of juniper.

_That’s what Crowley’s mouth would taste like now, if you kissed him._

It was a thought that required lying down and looking heavenward, a thought that required the cold clarity of the stars.

Not now. Not here. Not lying on his back in the grass next to Crowley, hopelessly drunk and fire-warmed, wondering what would happen if by some unplanned miracle he turned his head and Crowley did too…

He could just barely see Crowley’s eyes closing before his own closed too, and then a hot, wet press at his mouth set the world careening more precariously than before.

It wasn’t very graceful--Aziraphale was lying on his left side, Crowley on his right, and there were both not enough and far too many limbs involved. Their noses bumped, their lips were too slippery, and the damp ground pressed at half of their faces.

Aziraphale had never felt better in his life.

Crowley’s lips were soft and supple and tasted of mulberries, and he moved with unnerving gentleness. He kissed Aziraphale with the same tentative hope Aziraphale had felt when taking his first steps across clear water long ago. His hand came to rest on Aziraphale’s forearm as Aziraphale gently took hold of Crowley’s shoulder and pulled him closer.

The kiss was almost too soft, too much like slipping away. Aziraphale parted his lips a little to suck lightly on one of Crowley’s, a quiet plea for more.

He got more.

With a strangled noise Crowley lurched further sideways and opened his mouth. _Oh my,_ Aziraphale thought with the part of his mind that was still thinking. It felt like a weird, wet kind of blunder, but also like slipping into a hot bath or the decadent caress of silk. 

Aziraphale cradled the back of Crowley’s head as Crowley hooked an ankle around his leg and pulled them together. One hesitant lick of tongue against tongue became two, became twenty, became uncountable. Aziraphale tilted his head, opened further, pushed deeper. He’d come adrift in space, he wasn’t very sure which way was up and which was down. There was simply towards Crowley, and away from Crowley.

In theory Aziraphale heard the fire crackle, felt the night breeze blow, listened to the last strains of music from the village, but actually trying to perceive any of these with Crowley’s tongue making arabesques in his mouth was like trying to pick out constellations in a hurricane.

As Crowley mewled and crushed against him, Aziraphale’s imagination conjured a banquet of forbidden delights. He thought of rolling Crowley over on top of him, undoing laces, undoing everything, sinking into that quiet ecstasy with the demon who kept pressing impossibly closer.

_The demon--_

A warning light shaped like a halo blinked on in Aziraphale’s mind, and he broke off the kiss.

Crowley looked panicked for a moment, then put a finger to Aziraphale’s lips.

“Wait, ssssstop, I know what you’re gonna say, angel. ‘We shouldn’t do this, just got swept up in the atmosphere.’” Crowley’s voice was more hissing than vocalizing. Aziraphale could only understand what he was saying based on centuries of drunken precedent. 

Crowley took a deep breath and mustered something a bit more like speech. “I know, I already know. It’s a mistake. I mean they won’t know, will they? But we won’t do it again.”

“I—I’m so glad you agree,” Aziraphale said, at once immeasurably relieved and wondering how long he could draw out the conversation about how they shouldn’t be kissing while their legs were still entangled and their bodies pressed together.

But Crowley untwined himself with a heroic effort at sitting up, kissed Aziraphale once on the forehead, and then grabbed his bottle of gin and drank every last drop. Aziraphale struggled into a seated position. He kept his eyes on the stars and away from Crowley.

They spent the rest of the night arguing about the old rumor that shooting stars were the result of celestial clerical error.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is rated T. For the prompt "kink-free." 
> 
> CW for excessive drinking.


	3. Confection

Officially, they were exchanging information. A simple trade of names and deeds from good to evil and back again. It all came out equal in the end, didn’t it? 

Of course, none of that was a very good explanation for why Aziraphale was so nervous waiting on the steps in the courtyard, or why, after months of living in a simple habit within a mirrorless stone hall, he felt so acutely conscious of his humble appearance.

There was a flutter of robins taking abrupt flight and Crowley ambled into view, carrying a small basket wrapped in rough cloth. Red hair contrasted vividly with a burst of fresh flowers—foxgloves, Aziraphale saw. _Poisonous._

He was dressed like a kitchen maid— _no,_ she _was_ , he reminded himself. Crowley had asked him to use the feminine, and Aziraphale was determined to do a better job remembering than he’d done with the switch to “Crowley” several millennia before.

“Helps me get in the spirit of things, you know?” Crowley had said when first explaining her assignment to Warwick Castle.

Aziraphale had never known her to be terribly concerned by convention, and it wasn’t the first time he’d seen Crowley dressed like the other women around them, but this time she’d miracled herself a different body too.

“Humans don’t take kindly to ambiguities,” she’d muttered darkly to Aziraphale five years before.

He’d found her pointed face and shorter stature disconcerting at first, but now the new form of Crowley was as dear to him as the old, her fuller lips and thinner wrists and even more absurd gait another beautiful arrangement of a melody he knew. _A melody which haunts waking and sleeping…_

“Oh Satan, you weren’t kidding, you really did run off and join a monastery. Please tell me you haven’t taken a vow of silence, that’ll really screw up this meeting.” Crowley sat on the steps with a slump.

“Nice to see you too,” Aziraphale snipped from a higher stone stair. “And _no_ , I am at perfect liberty to speak, much as a vow of silence might make it easier to evade disagreeable conversations.”

Crowley grinned and adjusted the dark lenses sliding over the bridge of her nose. Aziraphale caught the barest flash of gold before it was occluded once more by black glass. 

“Remind me again why Heaven wanted you to join the holy boy’s-only club?”

Aziraphale sighed. “There have been, erm, ‘quality control issues’ with the written holy texts in Warwickshire. Too many Bibles being transcribed with errors.”

“And they decided the best use of your time was hunting down...incorrect incunabula, is it?”

Aziraphale frowned. _She has such a way of making reasonable frustrations with the job sound rather blasphemous._

“Well, it’s important that people take pride in their work,” he said stubbornly, as much to himself as to Crowley. “But I do find some of the errors rather amusing. In fact”—he looked around as though the hedges might be taking notes on their conversation (which, with an omniscient employer, one could never completely rule out)—”I’ve saved some of the best manuscript mistakes. Fancy I might have a whole shelf of them one day.”

Crowley leaned further back on the steps, exposing the lines of her neck in a way Aziraphale definitely shouldn’t have cared about. “Sounds like you’ve been very busy book-collecting.”

“Well what have you been up to this whole time?” Aziraphale asked. Why did he always look forward to these meetings when he was so constantly irritated by them?

“Getting the hang of walking again, for one,” Crowley said, pointing and flexing her feet. “I feel like I’ve finally got it, but for awhile there with the extra hips I felt like I was just swaying back and forth like a drunk puppy.”

Aziraphale did not have the heart to tell Crowley that “drunk puppy” was a generous description of how she’d walked not only for the last five years, but also the previous five thousand. Occasionally he wondered if she was just as wobbly of a slitherer by snake standards, though he suspected it was all that slithering that caused the wobbling in the first place. 

_Best not to speculate._

“Also, I’m supposed to be inconspicuously giving instructions on how to poison food to the rest of the kitchen staff, and it’s really hard to tell if it’s working or not because the Earl’s got such awful indigestion all the time.”

“How terrible,” Aziraphale said drily.

“Mostly though,” Crowley lifted the fabric covering the basket with triumph, “I’ve been making these.”

The basket was full of blooms, common wildflowers like the ones Aziraphale saw whenever he went for a walk and exotic flowers he had perhaps seen in gardens long ago (he’d seen all of them once, in a very particular garden as long ago as one _could_ go). They glittered as though encrusted with an uneven frost, or carved from impure gemstones. Or perhaps…

“They’re sugar,” Crowley said, plucking one from the basket with nimble, practiced fingers. “Sugar paste, mostly, doesn’t taste great. But I thought they looked nice when I stuck these extra crystals on them. Certainly the Earl’s never been one to turn down something shiny.”

“They’re beautiful,” Aziraphale breathed. His throat felt strangely full. For the last year and a half he’d been living with no ornamentation around save for the illuminations in the manuscripts he was supposed to be quality-controlling. Crowley’s sugar flowers looked as brilliant as those carefully copied books, and very nearly as painstaking. Aziraphale would never say it, but the basket of flowers struck him as something deserving the same kind of wonderment. 

Crowley held a sugar paste lily in her hand and was drawing closer across the stair.

Later, when Aziraphale would hear an actor at the Globe tell the Thane of Cawdor and Glamis to ‘look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t,’ he would think of Crowley as she was then, foxglove tucked behind her ear, shuffling ever so slightly closer, lips parted as if it was she who was going to bite the artificial lily and not Aziraphale

“Can I tempt you?” she asked, holding the bloom so the crystals caught the dying afternoon sun.

_Yes, you always do._

“Oh don’t start with that again, you fiend.”

Crowley made a weird purring noise from the base of her throat that made Aziraphale realize he was dreadfully hot under his heavy robes. She seemed to react to insults as if they were somewhat scandalous endearments, he noticed. Part of Aziraphale was acutely panicked that they were.

“Fine, I’ll try it,” Aziraphale relented as Crowley twirled the flower between her fingers. “It does look quite beautiful.”

He reached forward to take the lily, but Crowley only held it closer, and he realized she meant to feed it to him directly from her hand. 

“They’re delicate,” she explained. “Don’t want it spilling sugar crumbs all over your nice clean robes of poverty.”

It was an excuse, an excuse accompanied by a blush rising under her freckled cheeks, but one that Aziraphale decided to take at face value. He inched forward and bit off most of the sugar lily, feeling his lips brush Crowley’s palm.

It was sweet and not particularly delicious, but there was a pleasant floral scent to it he hadn’t expected from a false lily, and he realized the decorative sugar crystals had been formed from rosewater. Pity he could hardly pay attention to the flavor at all while his lips were tingling so much.

“Oh that’s—that’s marvelous,” he said, too much like a whisper.

Crowley popped the rest of the lily in her mouth, smiling without a hint of the usual wiles. Then, as Aziraphale felt his heart pound at his sternum like it was attempting siege upon the bone, Crowley raised her palm to her mouth and took a long, slow lick at the spot that Aziraphale’s lips had touched.

“I don’t like to waste any extra sugar,” she offered. It sounded like a challenge.

“You should have one,” Aziraphale said. “I had most of that one.”

“You just want another and you don’t want to ask for it. I knew it. Keep you in a monastery for a year and the second you’re back out you’re dining on confectionary flowers like it’s your life’s calling.”

“There’s nothing wrong with eating confectionary flowers,” Aziraphale huffed. “ _You’re_ supposed to be out poisoning people and you’re learning culinary arts and sharing your dessert.”

Crowley clapped a heart to her chest in mock surprise. “I guess I am.”

Her fingers made a slight indentation across one of her breasts, and Aziraphale was relieved when she took another flower from the basket, a yellow rose.

Watching her eat it was another matter.

“I should probably be getting back soon,” Aziraphale said. “You know, er, monk duties call.”

It sounded even stupider aloud than it had in his head.

“Aw, hang on, I saved the last petal for you,” Crowley said, holding up a single curve of sparkling sugar.

Aziraphale’s appreciation for sweets, his feeling there had already been enough flirting a little more would be practically nothing, and a strange bodily sensation he refused to acknowledge or identify propelled him forward against his better judgment.

This time he made no effort to keep his mouth from Crowley’s hand. He swallowed the petal, and still she lingered, depressing his bottom lip a little with one finger. Aziraphale swiped at a crystal on her fingertip with his tongue, and Crowley made a tiny moan he’d only heard her make once before, years ago in what seemed like a dream on a midsummer’s night.

From some distant reality, a bell chimed.

“Oh, fuck me,” Crowley said.

“I _beg_ your pardon?”

“If I don’t get back to prepare dinner now cook _will_ chop my head off, and much worse, I’ll have to explain it to Hastur.” She stood up and shook her skirt with more than warranted vigor. 

Aziraphale rose and handed her the basket, watching their hands almost touch.

Crowley opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again.

“Erm, Aziraphale, you know how I said kissing was obviously a mistake?”

The world capsized and righted itself in the time it took Aziraphale to ask a terrified, elated “Yes?”

“Well, I, ah. I like mistakes. Maybe you do too, you’ve got a nice collection of misprints. And maybe it’s the whole, y’know, demon thing, but sometimes I feel like making mistakes all day long.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said. His mind seemed to have vacated his body as his brain sluggishly substituted ‘kissing’ for ‘making mistakes’ and translated Crowley’s meaning. He wanted to admonish Crowley for suggesting something so shocking and wanted to kiss Crowley on the throat. Apparently the two impulses neutralized each other, he was unable to do anything except stand there like an idiot.

“Er, any thoughts, angel?”

“I think it’s important that people take pride in their work,” Aziraphale repeated slowly, drawing a truism from his jumbled thoughts. “I—I think we should all try not to make mistakes.”

Crowley’s expression barely shifted, but Aziraphale could see something around her mouth tighten, as though her face was fortifying itself.

“Yeah, right, course—I don’t know why I asked, stupid, of course we can’t—and you’ve got a real ‘vow of chastity’ look going on with this outfit too—I’m sorry angel, I don’t know why I—but just, er, just so you know, if you ever—”

“I think you’d better go,” Aziraphale said, feeling like he was dissolving as quickly as Crowley’s powers of coherent speech.

Crowley stopped speaking, nodded once, then rustled through the basket and picked out a particularly magnificent carnation. “Take it, I can’t eat all these, too hard on the fangs.”

“Thank you, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, avoiding her gaze. 

He brought the sugar carnation to his lips as he watched her run full-tilt back to the main gate, foxgloves strewn in her wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is rated T. Based on the prompt feeding/eating, which is not used in a kink context here.
> 
> I'm quite late on replies, but thank you so, so much to everyone who has left comments!
> 
> Our rating will be going way up next chapter as we switch to Crowley POV.


	4. Eden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The rating is going up in this chapter as we switch to Crowley POV in his beloved 14th Century. Based on the prompt "masturbation."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end notes for chapter-specific rating/warnings.

There were several reasons Crowley couldn’t sleep. For one thing, it was noon, and light was visible in his room despite the extra cloak he’d tossed over his curtains. For another, the local crows seemed to have chosen his windowsill to host a raucous, multi-generational murder. For a third, his cock was chafed all the way to Heaven and back, and he was still trying to coax his demonic flesh into another trip to Paradise.

Crowley squeezed, swore at the dull flash of pain that rewarded him, and paused for a moment to miracle up more slippery liquid to slick his overstrained right hand. 

Crowley released his grip on himself and breathed out for a moment. He needed something exceptionally pleasant to get his mind off the horrors of Hell, which had driven him to remain among humanity even in this lousy century, and the horrors of humanity, which had driven him away from the calamitous cities to this God-and-Satan-forsaken shack among the crows. 

It was time to revert to some highly un-original sins.

He closed his eyes, closed and uncurled his long, pale fingers.  _ Start with the wall, make it immense and unclimbable, and then climb it _ . On the other side Eden was dark, harmonious green. Lush, winding plants scrolled skywards-- _ how did you get plants to grow like that, anyway _ ? Animals gamboled happily in the verdant carpet of the newborn world, or leapt from its clear waters in arcs of joy.

When he imagined Eden like this, Crowley filled the gaps in his memory with lavish embellishment: curtains of flowering vines, ponds overflowing with water lilies, a luxuriant forest of low-lying, easy-slither trees. He dotted the fields with swans and ibises and egrets, a stylish accompaniment to the most beautiful pair of white wings he'd ever seen.

Because at the center of it was the angel, robed in white and fluttering slightly, and standing beside Crowley in the shade of a rather fateful tree.

It was a difficult job getting the angel exactly right in his mind. He would perfect the way the sun shone on a single curl, how it brought out the shimmer of gold in the white-blond. That bit of brilliance done, he would lose the angel’s smile, or the nervous movements of his plump hands, or the way his laugh sounded like the birth of stars. It was impossible to hold all the glories of the angel in his mind at one moment, let alone to keep them properly assembled as he embarked on his perverted revisionist history.

(Perhaps that was some innate quality in angels, Crowley wondered from time to time. Perhaps angels had some sort of anti-corruption code deep in their quintessence that made it difficult for the poor lustful demons of the world to slot them into their mental pornography.)

Crowley gave up trying to get his image of Aziraphale to match the splendor of the real thing, and settled for shortening daydream-Aziraphale’s robes so they barely covered the essentials, and recruiting a warm Edenic breeze to raise the hemline still further.

(He would feel more guilt about this sort of fantasizing if he hadn’t caught the angel’s gaze lingering on his own bare skin, if he didn’t still catch Aziraphale looking quickly away from him with something ravenous in his eyes.)

Crowley wriggled in the ragged, sweat-soaked sheets. Time to pick a specific flavor of elation, choose the particular kind of regretful ache he wanted to feel afterwards.

Sometimes he watched Aziraphale eat an apple and kissed the juice away from his mouth, kissed the sweet drops that fell further down until he’d licked his way across the angel’s body and Aziraphale had his fingers buried in Crowley’s hair and his wings spread in ecstasy. Sometimes Crowley was feeling unhurried and wistful and they would swim in one of Eden’s jewelbright ponds and dry themselves in the grass, trading lazy, sundrenched caresses. Sometimes Aziraphale would simply issue an implausible challenge (“you’re such an effective demon, prove it, seduce me”), make a ridiculous invitation (“oh you’re the demon snake that’s been sent to enact the will of Hell, come slither into my lap”) or ask some unthinkably stupid question (“would you like to experience Heaven again?” earnestly, kneeling).

(And sometimes Aziraphale retained the flaming sword, pressed the fiery blade to Crowley’s neck as he held Crowley from behind and thrust into Crowley’s limp, quivering body. It was inevitably the day after indulging in this type of vision that Crowley would meet Aziraphale in real life and Aziraphale would ask some particularly kind and solicitous question about a minor complaint Crowley had made months ago.  _ Evil reaps the destruction of what it masturbates to the seeds of and all that _ .)

The cloak over Crowley’s window dipped and a single gold ray of daylight sliced across the room, illuminating Crowley’s clenched hand and the aching red skin it was holding.

“Bit pointed, don’t you think?” Crowley muttered to the ceiling.

He flopped on his mattress and returned to Eden, speeding through some of the preliminaries in a blur of sloppy open-mouthed kisses and fluttering white feathers and undressing in the shade of apple branches. Dappled light that didn’t quite match the angle of Crowley’s imaginary sun danced across Aziraphale’s skin, forbidden, inviting.

Another gasping miracle, Crowley’s cramping hand became slippery again, and the burn between his legs was temporarily soothed. He gripped harder and gave a small, satisfying twist as daydream-Aziraphale backed him into the apple tree and knelt in the grass with a hungry smile. 

“I think you deserve something nice, don’t you, dear?” Aziraphale cooed.

When he wasn’t halfway to the brink of orgasm, Crowley reacted to the concept of niceness and the idea that he deserved any with angry hisses or worse, but both imaginary angel-kissed Crowley and wriggling, sweaty actual Crowley did nothing but whimper softly as Aziraphale opened his mouth and slowly swallowed the length of Crowley’s cock.

It was remarkable how much better his own frantic movements felt when he imagined Aziraphale’s hand holding his bare thigh and pressing him into the apple tree, Aziraphale’s mouth stretched open to allow him inside, Aziraphale’s tongue offering him endless, filthy kisses.

In real life it wouldn’t be like this. Probably Crowley could not convince Aziraphale to disrobe outdoors and suck off a demon, and even if he did it would probably be uncomfortable to have his spine pressed into tree bark, and they’d probably be menaced by inquisitive animals. Probably Crowley would say something stupid and ruin the whole thing. Probably Aziraphale would never kneel and smile and devour him, never touch Crowley like a lover, never moan in pleasure as Crowley came in his mouth…

The real Crowley convulsed and kicked as Eden dissolved in a euphoric rush. His furious hand finally came to rest as he exhaled the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“Bloody Heaven,” he said quietly, and snapped once to clean himself with the hand that had not been playing the part of Aziraphale.

It was a warm afternoon and the crows outside his window were as cacophonous as ever, but he rolled over in bed and threw himself into a dreamless, weeklong sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is rated around M/E. TW brief mention of fantasy about implied nonconsensual sex. If you'd like to read the chapter but avoid this, skip from "earnest, kneeling" to "The cloak over Crowley's window dipped."


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